In the hermetic world of contemporary art, where the value of a painting can be defined by whispers at a cocktail party and an artist’s prestige is often sealed through intersecting interests between gallerists and critics, “Velvet Buzzsaw” slices through like a sharp blade at a vernissage masquerading as a cultural apotheosis. The satire crafted by Dan Gilroy doesn’t settle for merely exposing the market’s vices — it dissects them with sarcasm and bloodshed, turning aesthetics into a battlefield and the gaze into an instrument of judgment. Here, art doesn’t liberate, sublimate, or redeem; it collects its dues.
The film maps an ecosystem where the artist ceases to be a subject and becomes raw material for consumption. In this microcosm, steered by inflated egos and rages disguised as sophistication, each artwork is a sentence, and each exhibition, a ceremony of canonization or execution. Gilroy explores the contours of this logic without resorting to easy answers: there are no heroes, nor innocents. Everyone — from the voracious critic to the clueless collector — plays a part in the farce, contributing to the symbolic death of authenticity. What hangs on the walls is merely the reflection of collective vanity.
By setting his film among sterile galleries and minimalist studios, Gilroy forges a pact between art and horror, stripping away the veneer of elegance to reveal the raw flesh of ambition. The satire gives way to the grotesque when a cursed collection turns beauty into a curse, and the characters, once shielded by their status, become victims of what they thought they controlled. Aesthetics, once mediated by discourse and price tags, become a vehicle of destruction. It is here that sharp humor merges with horror, draining intellectual pretension and exposing the panic before the untamable.
The protagonist Morf Vandewalt, a critic with venomous rhetoric and refined opportunism, embodies the decay of aesthetic mediation into speculative transaction. Through his relationships with figures like Rhodora Haze and Josephina, we witness the cynical dance that defines the art world, where alliances are temporary and ethics, a disposable luxury. Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance injects conflicting layers of allure and disgust, turning the character into a distorted mirror of the cultural institutions he both fuels and consumes. This isn’t moralism — it’s a chronicle of degradation turned spectacle.
Beneath this visceral narrative echoes an old tension: should art elevate or merely provoke? Educate or alienate? Gilroy isn’t interested in the answer. What matters is the denunciation of instrumentalization: when aesthetics surrender to the market, what gets consumed is not the object itself, but the fantasy of belonging. Art ceases to be an experience and becomes a fetish, a status symbol, a currency of distinction. “Velvet Buzzsaw” doesn’t just depict this phenomenon — it stages it with irony, horror, and symbolic precision.
Robert Elswit’s cinematography intensifies this atmosphere, inverting the classical horror palette by favoring saturated colors and flawless compositions, as if the image itself conspired against the viewer. The contrast between technical polish and narrative brutality suggests that, even at the height of sophistication, art can harbor a primal violence. The deaths, choreographed with macabre ingenuity, act as allegorical punishments: not for those who dare to create, but for those who distorted creation beyond recognition.
Some might argue that art, even when corrupted, endures. But perhaps what “Velvet Buzzsaw” proposes is precisely the opposite: when the link with the creative gesture is lost, art retaliates. It abandons its contemplative function and transforms into a sentence — not to redeem, but to collect with interest the frivolity of those who exploit it. It’s in this aesthetic reckoning that the film finds its most disturbing strength: the idea that beauty, once violated, responds with an equal degree of violence. Not to reclaim its purity, but to expose its absence.
Film: Velvet Buzzsaw
Director: Dan Gilroy
Year: 2019
Genres: Horror/Drama
Rating: 9/10